The Qumran site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947 was originally built by the Hasmoneans as a fortress, according to UCLA researchers. Scholars have long argued about the nature and archaeology of the site that was the home of the secretive and elusive Essene Jewish sect at the time of the Roman occupation of Judea. The UCLA researchers claim that the archaeological evidence shows it must have been built orignally as a fortress, then abandoned, probably around 60 BCE, when the Romans took control of the province’s security, before being occupied by the Essenes, probably by about 50 BCE, until they were driven out by the Romans during the Great Jewish Revolt (66-73 CE). top Spero News, 23-jul-2007 The Archaeological Survey of India is to restore Delhi’s Red Fort to its condition in 1947, when the British moved out and the Indian Army moved in. The plans include demolishing unsightly buildings erected by the army and renovating several colonial-era buildings. The Red Fort was built 1638-48 by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan as the centrepiece of his new capital. It was sacked in 1783 by Sikhs led by Baghel Singh Dhaliwal, marking their arrival as a regional military power. The Fort played a central role in the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, after which the British occupied it and deposed the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, beheading his sons and grandson in front of him. top The Times of India, 23-may-2007 Divers from the Australian Navy have recovered material from the site of a Japanese midget submarine to present to the families of the crew, who are believed to be still entombed in the wreck. The 2-man Ko-hyoteki class submarine is one of three that attacked Sydney harbour on the night of 31 May/1 Jun 1942, sinking a depot ship and killing 21 men. All the midget submarines and their crews were lost in the attack, two men committing suicide to avoid capture. top IBN News, 22-may-2007 A new book highlighting the current state of archaeological research into Taíno remains and artefacts on the Caribbean island of Jamaica. Up to 8 million Taíno inhabited The Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica and Puerto Rico when Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492, but Columbus and the Spanish soon imposed extortionate demands for tribute on them, backed up by mutilation or execution for defaulters, then effectively enslaved them through the “encomienda” system. Brutal suppression of resulting revolts, starvation and disease reduced the Taíno to only a few tens of thousands within about 40 years. top Jamaica Gleaner, 22-may-2007 Thousands of Hmong from Laos are still trying to escape from persecution by the communist Laotian government, that dates back to when the C.I.A. recruited about 30,000 Hmong to fight a guerilla war on their behalf (1962-73) in the “Secret War” against the North Vietnamese-backed communist Pathet Lao. After the Pathet Lao won power in the country in 1975, the Hmong were considered traitors, leading to about 300,000 fleeing into Thailand within a short time. top Yahoo! News, 20-may-2007 China is to turn the site of a former Japanese World War II camp for Western prisoners of war in the north-eastern city of Mukden (modern-day Shenyang) into a museum. Mukden was an important industrial city of Imperial Japan’s puppet state of Manchukuo from 1932 to 1945. top scotsman.com, 20-may-2007 Pope Benedict XVI has caused a storm of protest in South America for describing the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the continent in the 16th.-19th. centuries as a “purification” of the native populations and suggesting they “welcomed” conversion to Roman Catholicism. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and other native leaders from across South America have demanded an apology from the Pope for denying what they regard as the “holocaust” of slaughter and enslavement that the conquest resulted in - with, they claim, the blessing of the Roman Catholic Church. top eitb24, 19-may-2007 A memorial hall in Taipei, Taiwan, built to honour the former President of China in exile, Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), has been renamed to honour Taiwanese democracy amid violent protests by Kuomintang activists. From an early career in the Imperial Japanese Army, 1909-11, and during a brief involvement in organised crime, Chiang helped found the Kuomintang (KMT) in 1912, seizing the leadership on the death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925. His Northern Expedition (1926-28) and Central Plains War (1930) reunited China under the KMT, but his subsequent obsession with eradicating the Chinese Communists opened the door for Imperial Japan to seize Manchuria in 1931, then invade China proper in 1937, which Chiang couldn’t ignore. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, Chiang’s weakened and corrupt government was driven out of mainland China by Mao Zedong’s Communists, flying iinto exile in Taiwan on 10 December 1949. top Reuters, 19-may-2007 The remains of two wooden game boards, one of them complete with two bone dice and twenty-three glass counters, have been unearthed by archaeologists near Gravesend in Kent, south-east England. The dice game could be a version of Ludus Duodecim Scriptorum (“Game of Twelve Letters”), which was an early forerunner of Backgammon. The Roman Empire ruled England and Wales from 43-410 CE, during which the population changed from an Iron Age Celtic cuture and largely adopted Roman culture. top 24 Hour Museum, 19-may-2007 Marine archaeologists have recovered hundreds of thousands of gold and silver coins from a 17th. century shipwreck about 65 km. / 40 miles off the tip of Cornwall, south-west England. The haul is thought to be from the Merchant Royal, a dilapidated British ship that sank in the area in 1641 while transporting treasure to pay Catholic Spain’s army fighting the 80 Years War (1568-1648) in Flanders, that was soon to lead to independence for the Protestant Dutch. Britain, while at peace with Spain since 1628, was on the verge of its Civil Wars (1642-1651). top bbc.co.uk, 19-may-2007 Two studies of mid-east religion prior to the rise of Islam, in the mid-7th. century CE, have shown that much of Arabia and the Persian Gulf region had been dominated for nearly 2,000 years by powerful cults, of Indian origin, that worshipped, and probably required worshippers to handle, venomous snakes. The Qur’an declared war (9:1-8) on all those who worship anything other than Allah (i.e. the God of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed), and polytheism was largely eradicated from the mid-east by the end of the 7th. century. top Discovery News, 17-may-2007 A couple from Britain has traced the course on the ground of 3,000 miles of the Great Walls of China, often using satellite images to follow stretches of wall that have disappeared above ground. Several walls were built over a period of over 2,100 years, from about 500 BCE to the early 1600’s CE. The early walls were made of compacted earth and timber, little of which has survived above ground, mostly only the much later stone and brick sections are still standing. top Times Online, 17-may-2007 Limited guided tours of the Powhatan city of Werowocomoco are being offered for June. The city was one of the main cities of Wahunsenacawh‘s Powhatan Confederacy in 1607, when the first English settlers established Jamestown, Virginia USA. The English soon came into conflict with the native people, and over the next 80 years, the Powhatan tribes were decimated by disease and English attacks. top dailypress.com, 17-may-2007 Vandals, apparently hunting for American Civil War relics, have dug about 100 holes in the Vicksburg battlesite in Mississippi, USA, and caused severe damage to the Texas Monument. The siege of Vicksburg was the successful climax of Ulysses S Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign, and the capture of the city, on 4 July 1863, gave the Union command of the Mississippi River, effectively splitting the Confederacy in two, and sent the 30,000 men of Pemberton’s army into captivity, a loss the South would never recover from. top Houston Chronicle, 15-may-2007 The grave of Israeli spy Eli Cohen, executed in Syria in 1965 is completely inaccessible under a suburb of Damascus that has grown up since, according to a Syrian official. Successful infiltration by Cohen of the Syrian government, and extensive intelligence, supplied by him, about their Golan Heights defences, played a key role in Syria’s rapid defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War two years later. top YNet, 14-may-2007 Archaeologists in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA, believe they’ve found the remains of Fort Duquesne, built by the French in 1754 as the most southerly of a string of forts stretching up to Lake Erie, but destroyed and abandoned by them in 1758 in the face of British advances in the French and Indian War (1754-1763). top CentreDaily.com, 15-may-2007 Alexander the Great‘s conquest, in 332 BCE, of Tyre, in modern-day Lebanon, is renowned for the half-mile-long causeway that his engineers were believed to have raised from the seabed to enable his army to reach the island city. But recent geological studies, including core samples of the causeway, have shown that a significant sand bridge linking the island to the coast had already grown up in the centuries preceding Alexander’s arrival, merely requiring his engineers to strengthen it before it would be suitable for the assault. top LiveScience.com, 14-may-2007 The remains of an infant have been found in (probably Roman) catacombs at a site in Malta that is being redeveloped as private apartments, despite never having been researched archaeologically. Malta, a strategically key island in the centre of the Mediterranean Sea, was colonised by Phoenicians about 1000 BCE, then Greeks about 720 BCE. By about 400 BCE it was part of the Carthaginian empire, but was lost to the Roman Republic at the beginning of the Second Punic War in 218 BCE. Muslim Abbasid Arabs ruled from 870-1091, then Christian Normans 1091-1530, then Knights Hospitaller 1530-1798 when Napoleon Bonaparte briefly controlled the island until the British took it in 1800, finally granting independence in 1964. top Malta Today, 13-may-2007 Tens of thousands of Republican victims of Spanish Civil War massacres are finally being exhumed for proper burial. The 1936-39 war led to the Fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco, who died in 1975, during which Fascist dead from the war were reburied with great honour. Franco, who led a mutiny of Spain’s Army in Morocco, received significant support from Hitler and Mussolini, but then refused to reciprocate when the Second World War broke out. The Republicans received significant support from Stalin’s Soviet Union. top Times Online, 13-may-2007 Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister during the 1980’s, has unveiled a new memorial to the 1982 Falklands War. Argentina, which at the time was under a military government, invaded the Falklands/Malvinas on 2 April, whereupon Britain hastily sent a Task Force that recaptured the islands on 14 June, after a short, sharp, air, sea and land conflict, including several amphibious assaults, that killed 907 and injured 1,845. top Guardian Unlimited, 12-may-2007 Modern development in the U.S. state of Arizona, centred on the city of Phoenix, shows remarkable parallels with the growth of the Hohokam civilisation, that flourished in the same area about 200-1450 CE. Almost identical irrigation canal networks, cotton production, sprawling communities north to modern-day Flagstaff and south to modern-day Tucson, even the rising salinity of the water supply, show close parallels between the modern Arizona civilisation and the Hohokam (which means “all used up” or “burnt out”), whose civilisation collapsed due to environmental degradation. top The Arizona Republic, 13-may-2007 The remains of 17 aborigines are being flown back to Tasmania, Australia, this weekend. As in the rest of Australia, the aboriginal people were treated as little better than animals by the first white settlers in Tasmania, who arrived in 1803, culminating in the Black War of the 1820’s, during which massacres and European diseases reduced aboriginal numbers from several thousands to about 300 in 1833, who were then exiled by their British rulers to nearby Flinders Island. The last “full-blood” Tasmanian aborigine died in 1876, but the remaining “mixed-blood” descendants still had to endure, from about 1900-1972, the forcible removal of their children and eradication of their culture by government and Christian agencies. top Guardian Unlimited, 12-may-2007 An “Unknown Englishman” who was murdered by Nazis evacuating Rome in 1944, along with 13 other Gestapo prisoners, and tentatively identified last month as “Captain John Armstrong”, has been re-identified by the son of one of his Sardinian contacts as Gabor Adler, a British Special Operations Executive agent. Adler had been landed in Sardinia with Salvatore Serra in January 1943, in what is thought to be part of an effort to divert German defences from the planned July invasion of Siciliy. Serra avoided the massacre and survived the war, dying in 1974. top Times Online, 10-may-2007 A museum in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, that commemorates the period 1878-1918 when the country was ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire and the assassination that sparked the First World War, is to reopen after 15 years. The museum was devastated during the Bosnian War (1992-1995), when Serb forces besieged Sarajevo and pounded it with mortar, artillery and sniper fire. top AP, 8-may-2007 German scientists have been given government funding to reconstruct 45 million documents shredded or manually torn-up by panicked Stasi agents after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The East German secret police employed 90,000 agents and 174,000 informers to spy on the country’s 17 million population. Using computer-based technology, a Berlin institute expects to complete the reconstruction by 2013 - a manual effort had been estimated to require until 2395 at the earliest. The process is expected to reveal “highly explosive” new information. top Guardian Unlimited, 10-may-2007 Turkish archaeologists will spend 3 months later this year excavating and restoring the Commagene city of Zeugma, on the Euphrates River near Turkey’s border with Syria. The kingdom of Commagene dates back to Assyrian times (early 1st. millennium BCE), and probably emerged from the disntegration of the Hittite Empire towards the end of the previous millennium. Zeugma itself was reputedly founded by Seleucus I Nicator, the founder of the Seleucid Empire, in 300 BCE, and was notable for its pontoon bridge across the Euphrates, but was destroyed in 256 CE by the Sassanid king Shapur I, never regaining its former prominence. top Nirvana International, 9-may-2007 Despite an official acknowledgment in 1976 that Air America was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the C.I.A., and despite the extreme danger that the civilian volunteers who operated the airline often worked and flew in, in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and even China, during the Vietnam War, Air America retirees have fought a fruitless battle for U.S. government-employee benefits - until now. New Senate majority leader, Harry Reid (D-Nev.), is championing legislation aimed at getting the Air America vets the recognition many feel they’ve too long been denied. top Los Angeles Times, 7-may-2007 Archaeologists working in the fort at Jamestown, Virginia USA, have found a cache of arms and armour buried about a metre below the original, 17th. century, ground surface. The site has not yet been fully excavated, as the first finds occurred just days before the British Queen recently visited the fort, but already late 16th./early 17th. century swords and pieces of personal armour have been unearthed. Archaeologists believe they may have been dumped in June 1610, when the settlers temporarily abandoned the settlement, into a rubbish pit which, itself, may mark the original well dug when they arrived in 1607. top dailypress.com, 10-may-2007 Dutch businessman Frans van Anraat, jailed for 15 years in 2005 on war crimes charges related to supplying the raw materials for Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons in the 1980’s, has had his appeal rejected and his sentence increased to 17 years. Saddam Hussein used poison gas repeatedly against the Iranians during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, and used them against his own Kurdish population in Halabja in March 1988. top Reuters, 9-may-2007 After 35 years of searching, Israeli archaeologist Ehud Netzer claims to have found the tomb of Herod the Great (~74-4 BCE) at Herodium, in the West Bank near Jerusalem. Herod usurped the throne of Judea from the Hasmoneans in 40 BCE, exploiting his family’s connections in Rome, driving out the last independent Hasmonean king, Antigonus, and his Parthian backers in 37 BCE, after a 2-year civil war, and making Judea a Roman client state. top Times Online, 9-may-2007 Russian boy-scouts have destroyed a medieval cemetery in the mistaken belief that it was a mass grave for victims of a Nazi massacre. The cemetery, near Shimsk in north-west Russia, was a “protected” archaeological site dating back to the 13th.-14th. century Novgorod Republic. Novgorod fought Sweden in 26 wars, culminating in the Battle of the Neva (1240), and fought the German military Livonian Order and Teutonic Order in 11 wars, culminating in the Battle on the Ice (1242), both made famous by Eisenstein’s film and Prokofiev’s music “Alexander Nevsky”. The republic finally fell to Ivan III of Moscow in 1478. top Regnum, 8-may-2007 No-one took seriously Arthur Betts’ wartime tale about him escaping as a PoW from a torpedoed Japanese troopship, overpowering the guards the Japanese had left onboard to prevent escape, and swimming miles across shark-infested waters through a hail of Japanese bullets - especially as he couldn’t swim! However, the story was true, the ship was the Lisbon Maru, sunk by the U.S. submarine Grouper on 1 October 1942, in which well over a thousand British PoW’s from the fall of Hong Kong died, and he had reached the nearby Chinese Zhousan islands clinging to a piece of flotsam, where Chinese villagers rescued dozens from the water and protected them in what’s seen in China as a prime example of resistance to Japanese occupation. top Times Online, 7-may-2007 An 800-year-old ship laden with trade goods is to be raised from the seabed near Yangjiang City in China’s southern Guangdong province. The ship dates back to the Southern Song Dynasty, that was overthrown by Chinggis Khan’s grandson, Kublai Khan, in 1279, and was almost certainly trading along the Marine Silk Road that, while the Mongol conquests of the 13th. Century ravaged Asia and the Mid-East, provided the only link between Europe and China. top Xinhua, 6-may-2007 The formerly unsuspected memoirs of Stalin’s mother, Keke Djugashvili, have been found in a former Soviet archive in Georgia, the dictator’s home state. She paints a portrait of a sensitive, intelligent, studious boy, her “SoSo”, who doted on his mother but lived in fear of his brutal, alcoholic father. Stalin’s 30 years as the head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922-1953) were tainted above all by his ruthless purges, mass deportations, notorious gulags and genocides, which, together, are believed to have killed around 10-15 million of his subjects. top Times Online, 6-may-2007 Members of the U.S. Air Forces Escape and Evasion Society in St. Louis, Missouri, finally got to meet, this week, some of the resistance members who helped them escape from Nazi-occupied western Europe after they were shot down. During the strategic bombing campaign against Germany in World War 2, thousands of British and American airmen were helped by civilian networks to escape to neutral countries, or even neutral ships, from where they could make their way back to their units and rejoin the campaign. Untold thousands of those civilian helpers lost their lives in the process. top USA Today, 2-may-2007 A silver opium pipe, set with diamonds and rubies, that belonged to Clive of India, has gone on display in Powis Castle in Wales. Clive was the first of the so-called “soldier-politicals” who established British control of India. Especially during his second posting to India (1755-60), he secured British control over the rich north-eastern province of Bengal, providing a solid base and revenue for eventual expansion throughout the subcontinent and neighbouring Burma. top bbc.co.uk, 4-may-2007 An in-situ block made of local beechwood has been recovered from under about 2 metres of seawater at the site of the key Indus Valley Civilisation city of Dwaraka. The civilisation flourished about 3000-1700 BCE, contemporarily with Ancient Egypt up to about the end of the Middle Kingdom, Sumer and Babylonia up to about the fall of Babylon, but seems to have fragmented as central authority broke down in the face of climate change and, possibly, increased seismic activity, as well as Aryan invasions. Ancient Dwaraka itself seems to have been built as a planned city, largely on reclaimed land, probably becoming submerged and abandoned due to earthquakes (and possibly tsunamis), about 1400BCE. top The Hindu, 4-may-2007 Archaeologists in Bolivia have found the 1,300-year-old skeleton on a priest/king in a Tiwanaku pyramid. The Tiwanaku city-state was founded about 200BCE near Lake Titicaca in the central Andes, and developed an innovative style of agriculture, using a patchwork of raised fields (“suka kollus”) intersected by canals, designed to insulate the crops from excesses of both heat and cold. The state reached the height of its power after about 600 CE, but collapsed about the year 1000, probably due to a combination of environmental problems and invasions from the south. top About, 2-may-2007 The South Korean government has announced plans to seize assets from the descendants of Koreans who collaborated with the 1910-1945 Japanese occupation. Japan, then undergoing rapid industrialisation and expansion, annexed Korea illegally in 1910, ending over 500 years of the Joseon Kingdom. The 35-year occupation is regarded in Korea as a time of ruthless exploitation and oppression by the Japanese. The move is likely to be studied closely by other countries that suffered similar colonisation. top Newsday.com, 2-may-2007 Delhi Archaeology Department is to restore 6 monuments - 3 gateways of Badarpur Sarai (palace) and 3 nearby Kos Minars (distance markers) - from the time of the Mughal Empire. The Mughals were descendants of Chinggis Khan’s Mongols who had embraced Islam in the 14th. century, then went on to carve out an empire covering modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and most of India by about 1680. It then began to crumble under pressure from the Hindu Marathas in the south, the rise of Sikh militancy in the Punjab (north-west) under Guru Gobind Singh, and the incursions of European colonial powers such as the Portuguese, British, French and Dutch. top Express India, 1-may-2007 The statue of a Soviet soldier removed from a square in central Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, on Friday amid violent protests by ethnic-minority Russians, was re-erected in a nearby military cemetery yesterday (30-apr). Estonia, with its cultural roots in Scandinavia and Germany, was contested between Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Russia from the 13th. century to 1710, when it was absorbed into the Russian Empire. Along with the other Baltic Republics - Latvia and Lithuania - Estonia gained its independence after the 1917 Russian Revolution, but all three were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 as a result of Stalin’s 1939 pact with Hitler’s Germany. Occupied by the Germans from 1941-1944, and again by the Soviets from 1944, Estonia finally gained its independence in 1991. top The Guardian, 1-may-2007 More than 40 high-status coffins have been found, unusually buried together, in east China’s Jiangxi province. The tomb has been dated to about the beginning of China’s Warring States Period (~475-221BCE) - when the large number of statelets that arose during the Spring and Autumn Period (that followed the fall of the Shang Dynasty ~1045BCE), were gradually swallowed up by the 7 main Warring States - and has been associated with the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, who had orchestrated the downfall of the Shang. top People’s Daily Online, 30-apr-2007 The world-famous Isle of Skye is to be renamed Eilean a’ Cheo to reassert its Gaelic heritage. The island, off the west coast of Scotland was immortalised in a Scottish song (“Sail bonny boat, like a bird on the wing, over the sea to Skye...”) commemorating the flight of Bonnie Prince Charlie after his failed 1745-6 bid to regain the U.K. crown for the Stuart family line. The “Forty-Five” was the last in a series of French-backed Scottish/Jacobite rebellions against English domination, and led to the ruthless suppression of Gaelic language and culture. top Telegraph.co.uk, 30-apr-2007
Ground radar is to be used to find the unmarked mass graves of the British and Australian dead from the Battle of Fromelles, 19-20 July 1916, who were buried by the Germans. Less famous than the battles at Gallipoli, and eclipsed by the Battle of the Somme, the battle is described on the Australian War Memorial as “the worst 24 hours in Australia’s entire history”. Originally intended as a diversion to relieve the pressure on the British Army at the Somme, the attack was a disaster, resulting in about 7,000 British casualties - 5,500 of them Australians - and about 1,500 German casualties. It’s believed that Adolf Hitler was among the German defenders in the battle. top The Sunday Post, 29-apr-2007
After suffering a brutal 15 year civil war, that still simmers ominously, and 132 years of French colonialism, that cost the lives of more than 1 million Algerians to throw off, some Algerians are finally trying to write their own pre-colonial history from what the French failed to eradicate. From 1830 to 1962 France tried hard to erase Algerians’ history, language and culture and turn them into Francophones and Francophiles, as well as settling hundreds of thousands of French colonists on confiscated lands. The 8-year Algerian War of Independence resulted in independence and the flight of over a million colonists, their descendants and collaborators, to France. top Sunday Herald, 29-apr-2007
Scotland’s disastrous Darien Venture at the turn of the 17/18th. centuries could so easily have been a historical triumph. The expedition aimed to sieze control of part of the Isthmus of Panama, close to the modern Panama/Colombia border, enabling Scotland to establish - and, of course, profit from the taxes raised by - a trade route between the Caribbean and the Pacific, using the rivers with relatively short cross-country portage routes. The venture collapsed amidst disease, starvation, attacks from rival Spanish colonies, and the stubborn refusal of the English king William III to allow English colonies to assist the Scots - even though William was also king of Scotland! The economic crisis caused by the failure of the venture led directly to Scotland’s subordination to England in the 1706/7 Acts of Union. top The Scotsman, 28-apr-2007, & The Observer, 29-apr-2007
Archaeologists have been given the chance to investigate the site of much of the development planned for the 2012 Olympics in London. As well as associations with London’s aerial defences in both World Wars, and with the medieval Knights Templars, the site contains the Channelsea River, dug in the 9th. century by the first Anglo-Saxon king, Alfred the Great, to defend London against the Vikings. Both the Biritish Royal Navy and the U.S. Navy consider Alfred the Great to be their founder. top Daily Mail, 26-apr-2007
The Archaeological Survey of India has added the house of Lord Cornwallis at Danapur in Patna, from his time as Governor-General of India from 1786-1793, to its list of protected monuments. Charles Cornwallis (1738-1805) was a controversial figure: blamed in Britain for losing the American War of Independence at the 1781 Seige of Yorktown; lauded in India for pushing through the Permanent Settlement land reforms; and reviled in Ireland for executing prisoners-of-war after the Battle of Ballinamuck during the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland. top Hindustan Times, 24-apr-2007
An extremely rare Airco D.H.9 bomber from the First World War has gone on display at the British Imperial War Museum in Duxford in Cambridgeshire, England. Discovered in a dilapidated condition in India, the machine has been carefully restored and returned to its original wartime airfield. Thousands of D.H.9’s were produced from 1917-1919, despite its vulnerability to German fighters and its propensity for crashing (hence its rarity). top Royston Crow, 24-apr-2007
A week-long archaeological dig at Montgomery castle, in mid-Wales, hopes to shed light on its roles in the subjugation of Wales by the English and the English Civil War. Built about 1224, by the weak Henry III of England, the castle was attacked repeatedly by Llewelyn the Great and his son and successor Dafydd ap Llewelyn in the 13th. Century, as the Welsh struggled to retain their independence. 400 years later, it was back in action on the losing (Royalist) side of the English Civil War. Shortly after it fell to the Parliamentarians, in 1644, it was demolished and never rebuilt. top bbc.co.uk, 24-apr-2007
The Battle of Bosworth Field was the decisive battle of the English Wars of the Roses, marking the end of the French Plantagenets, with the death in the battle of Richard III, and the accession to power of the Welsh Tudors. However, although its date, 22 August 1485, is in no doubt, its location has been a subject of considerable dispute. Now, two years into a three-year survey of the area where the battle is believed to have been fought, a tiny heraldic silver eagle dating from the late 15th. century has been unearthed at Ambion Hill in Leicestershire, England. The archaeologists are hopeful of linking the eagle to a noble who fought in the battle - possibly William Stanley, whose emblem was an eagle. top Leicestershire Mercury, 20-apr-2007
Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco, the dictator of Spain 1936-1975, whom Hitler helped to power, developed joint plans in October 1940 to seize North Africa the following year. According to recently re-emerged transcripts of the interrogation of Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering at the end of World War II, the “Gibraltar Plan” would have involved 50 German and Spanish divisions seizing all of North Africa, from Senegal and Morocco (and Gibraltar) in the west to Egypt and the Suez Canal in the east, leaving “no possible chance of any enemy penetrating to the Mediterranean”. The plan was shelved in March 1941 because of the increasing “Russian danger”. top HistoryNet.com
New film has emerged showing British troops at ANZAC Cove during the 1915 Dardanelles campaign of World War I. The 1-minute black-and-white film is thought to have been shot by British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, who made a 20-minute documentary of the expedition. The cove was named after the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, who received their baptism of fire in the campaign which was intended to knock Turkey out of the war, but foundered on the Gallipoli peninsula, being forced to withdraw after suffering more than 140,000 battle casualties. top Telegraph.co.uk, 19-apr-2007
A letter from the U.S. Ambassador in South Korea to the State Department in Washington D.C. dated 26 July 1950, the first day of the killing of civilians at No Gun Ri, states clearly that the U.S. military had a policy of shooting approaching civilians in Korea. The U.S. Army has acknowledged that its 2001 investigation found the letter, but ignored it. top Newsday.com, 13-apr-2007
A 1,900-year-old Roman shore fort at Caister-on-Sea in Norfolk, England, has been badly damaged by a mechanical excavator brought in to assist archaeologists investigating the site. Due to a misunderstanding, the machine dug a 50ft. by 3ft. trench across the fort’s defences before the supervising archaeologist arrived on site. The fort is close to the place where Queen Boudica (aka Boadicea) of the Iceni launched her revolt, in about 61 CE, that came close to driving the Romans out of Britannia 18 years after they invaded, and was probably built to prevent any repetition. top express.co.uk, 15-apr-2007
In 1780 and 1781, during the American War of Independence (1775-83), Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox”, and his ragtag militia harried the British and Loyalist forces from their hideaways in the wetlands of the South Carolina Lowcountry - indeed, some historians believe his guerrilla campaign played a decisive role in the ultimate defeat of the British. Yet hard evidence of his men’s presence in the area has been as elusive as the Swamp Fox himself was. But now, archaeologist Steven Smith has found over 100 metal artefacts, including rifle balls, a British cannonball, belt buckles and buttons, a brass candleholder, equestrian gear, and other evidence of a temporary camp at Dunham Bluff in Marion County. Smith believes that Marion’s group moved frequently from camp to camp, perhaps only spending a few weeks in one location, and he hopes to announce in the near future the locations of other Marion camps in the area. top bellevillenewsdemocrat.com, 13-apr-2007
On 28 September 1874, U.S. Cavalry under Colonel Ranald Mackenzie moved into Palo Duro Canyon, in the Texas Panhandle, to attack several Native American tribes that were settling into the canyon for the winter. In a running battle - the culmination of a 3-month “Red River War” campaign during which as any as 20 engagements were fought - the people were slain and scattered, and the tribes forced to submit to the reservation programme and accept exile from their ancestral lands. Now, Texas Parks and Wildlife archaeologists are attempting to piece together the course of the Battle of Palo Duro - over 1,000 artefacts have been unearthed already and significant areas remain unexplored. top News8Austin, 8-apr-2007
90 days before General Santa Anna Peréz de Lebrón’s Mexican army famously stormed the Alamo mission in San Antonio, Texas, on 6 March 1836 after a 13-day siege, Texian rebels had captured San Antonio from General Martin Perfecto de Cós after a much less famous 2-month siege. About 23 march this year, workers installing a storm drain near the Main Plaza found the remains of a defensive trench dug into the bedrock from the earlier siege. Archaeologists have recovered flints, for the flintlock muskets of the time, and a Mexican army sword tip from the infill of the trench. top Houston Chronicle, 7-apr-2007
Egyptian archaeologists have found a mud-brick fort with four towers at the eastern edge of the Nile delta near the Mediterranean coast, dating to Egypt’s 18th. Dynasty (~1550-1307BCE) immediately after the expulsion of the foreign “Hyksos” rulers. The Hyksos are believed to have been Semites (i.e. Assyrians or Hebrews) from the area of Palestine/Syria who conquered then ruled Lower and Middle Egypt (i.e. the Nile Delta and the area of modern Cairo, up to about the modern town of Mallawi) from about 1650-1550BCE and introduced the composite bow and the horse-drawn chariot to Egypt. The fort contains some of the earliest remains of horses found in Egypt, and is believed to correspond to reliefs found in the Karnak temple at Luxor (ancient Thebes, the capital of Upper Egypt) that outline the Egyptians’ strategy to prevent future Hyksos invasions. top NationalGeographic.com, 2-apr-2007
U.S. National Park Service archaeologists have been using metal detectors to investigate the Piper Orchard sector of the American Civil War battlefield of Antietam/Sharpsburg. Here, in the afternoon of 17 Sep. 1862, the Union 7th. Maine regiment was driven back with heavy losses by a smaller Confederate infantry force supported by concentrated artillery fire. The archaeologists have recovered hundreds of bullets and shell fragments that trace the advance and retreat of the 7th. Maine, and indicate that the opposing lines traded fire from as little as 70 yards (64 metres) apart. top Herald-Mail.com, 28-mar-2007
